Tag: Laserfiche

Love it or hate it, email continues to be one of the most (over) used applications for the “always on generation” – the “connected” 24/7, always on generation. Young and old, these are the people who can’t make it more than 30 minutes without checking their phone for something…anything. We’re addicted to the serotonin drip triggered by information and entertainment.

With the proliferation of mobile computing and social media, there are a 100 different ways to message someone today. So why is email still the primary app for one-to-one and group conversation?

Price – For consumers and personal use, it’s “free”. Notably, Outlook.com (Microsoft), Gmail.com (Google), and Yahoo MAIL (Yahoo) are the Big 3, providing free email services without any subscription or hardware purchase requirements. And for $5/user per month any startup or small business can purchase enterprise grade (ad free, spam protected, calendar integration, and guaranteed uptime) business class email. In comparison, you may spend $50/user per month or more on an enterprise application which provides social engagement, collaboration, and document management.

Integration – It works. We’ve had 40+ years to iron it out. The concept was spawned shortly after the inception of networked computers, when ARPANET came online in the early 70’s. Since then, many standards and protocols have been developed AND broadly adopted for email message and file transfer. Anyone with an email address can easily send a message or file to anyone else on ANY email service.

Have you ever messaged someone @twitter via Facebook messenger?

Your email address is a digital address that allows you to connect with anyone no matter what company or platform you’re with. Many people have multiple email accounts, but we all have our one Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook.com account where we route all our personal notifications and subscriptions. I personally receive 20+ automated emails per day from social media, CRM, and collaboration systems – not to mention the 100+ other emails generated by employees, friends, and associates.

Conversations & Attachments: Email is the quickest, easiest way to transport small files to someone or a group, have a conversation, schedule a meeting, and search. Are there better applications? Sure. Do they require you to login to another system and grant access or licenses to a collaborator? Yep!

Do they seamlessly integrate with email, collaboration and messaging systems? Nope!

Corporate Culture: If you’ve recently joined a new company, your email address was most likely set up before you even set foot at work. Like social media, every enterprise application we use today leverages email for notifications, report distribution, etc. Ironically, or maybe expectedly, most companies use email as if it were social media or a short messaging service. After all, SMTP (one of the original email protocols) stands for simple mail transfer protocol.

Some, most days… we all wish we weren’t enslaved to corporate email 24/7… Will we ever move on from email?

For me, it’s this reason (corporate culture and software) that keeps email ingrained in our day to day lives. Corporate culture and software, rely so heavily on email for signup and distributed notifications, it’s relatively impossible for a “David” to come along and slay “Goliath”. When we look at technology adoption curves, email is one of – if not, the most widely adopted apps worldwide. For example, Facebook has approximately 1.3 Billion users alone. There are approximately 3x as many active email accounts in the world than there are both Facebook and Twitter combined. There are 4x more emails sent each day than there are web page views – in the entire world!

At CMA, we realize email is a problem that cannot be solved in 2014 and more a problem that must be managed. Understanding email should be put in its place, we build enterprise applications to help companies capture and manage email more efficiently. http://www.integratedcma.com/email-manager/

Alexander Cajko works for one of the world’s leading providers of trust and corporate management services. With over 1,500 specialists working from 33 offices in 24 countries, including the world’s most important financial centers. Client service is key to the the business model, hence email communications and records are critical to their ongoing services and customer relationships. For document management, records management, and workflow, the IT department standardizes the business on Laserfiche. In 2013, Email Manager was selected to automate, track, and classify email communications due to its seamless integration with Laserfiche.

Challenge

We need to store all client material in a central location. As we store all client related material in a central Document Management System (Laserfiche) we needed a method to store communications with the client in this same repository. Providing a single source of all documentation & communications. Without a solution, emails were printed and stored in a physical location. Making it time consuming to find communications. We’d tried other products before we found Email Manager, but there were issues with support, software stability, and integration with Laserfiche.

From an IT perspective the requirements are: minimal impact to infrastructure for performance and alignment with our architecture (Exchange servers & Microsoft centric Environment). The product also needed to be light weight with a simple architecture to minimize IT support team headaches associated with deployment and support. One of the main requirements was the ability for the application to leverage our existing database configurations and data structures standardized in other systems. Laserfiche has this feature and we also needed it available separately as part of the email management features. No other applications on the market had these features. Synchronization across Outlook users and de-duplication were also high on the IT requirements list as the volume of email is vast and highly distributed. We needed a solution that was intelligent enough to handle distributed and automated updating of email conversations in next to real time, while also ensuring multiple copies of emails would not be duplicated on the Laserfiche server.

Business Perspective

Without email management, emails were printed and stored in a physical location – making it time consuming to find communications. Now emails, attachments, and other electronic documents are stored in one place where they are easily searchable & available to all colleagues (who have access of course). If not printed, emails would be trapped in Outlook or individuals would spend a great deal of time manually filing with drag-and-drop. With Email Manager, we can now automatically track and classify entire email threads complete with attachments, and instantly upload to Laserfiche. Email Manager’s ‘tag-once’ technology enables users, in a single action, to classify all emails and attachments sent and received in a given thread or conversation.

One of our favorite features is the ability for Email Manager Rules to automatically classify emails without any manual intervention – saving more time.

Email Manager has been implemented in the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Curacao regional centers and will be the standard application used for all our offices going forward. It has proven itself. It’s clear that CMA, as a company, has the right knowledge of integration technology’s and delivers extremely well built solutions.

-Alexander Cajko, IT Project Manager

Since implementing Email Manager, we will recapture thousands of productivity hours. Saving 1-2 minutes per email with an average of 50 emails filed and searched each day per person equates to 375,000 hours per year across our 1500 employees. The productivity gains and simplicity make it easier for the employees to adopt, which means company documents and communications are complete and in compliance with industry and government regulations.

Conclusion

In addition to increased compliance and minimized risk, organizations are gaining 30-60 minutes per person per day in productivity with integrated search, archiving, and automation features provided by the solution. This is a powerful business case for conducting all your business inside email—and staying there—leaving Email Manager to save you time and money.

Email Manager also integrates with Microsoft Sharepoint and EMC.

Applications:

Organizing Communications for Filing and Search

Workflow and Business Process Management

Records Management and Compliance

If you’d like to see Email Manager in a live demonstration, contact us below…

Email is a valued asset for so many companies running ECM and CRM systems, yet most are still waiting for a simple, easy to use integration, connecting these two mission critical applications. Imagine an application which could seamlessly integrate email from Microsoft Outlook and Exchange with Laserfiche or any other enterprise application. Seamless management of customer correspondence in the financial industry is not only required, but also boosts employee productivity and customer satisfaction.

The Problem:

The financial industry adheres to regulations which require those companies to keep track of all their customer communications and case files. FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, publishes guidelines for records to be made and kept. SEA Rule 17a-3 and 17a-4 outline the general guidance for exchange members, brokers, and dealers and specifically address electronic record keeping.

Advisors and customer representatives handle between 25-50 customer related emails per day. Some companies will print and file email in paper form. Others will have their employees manually copy, import and index for electronic filing. Both methods consume approximately 1 minute per email per day – which translates to 25 -50 minutes per day, not including the start-stop time it takes to transition from one task or thought to another. Additionally, future searches are often very time consuming, chaotic and frustrating.

The Solution:

An application that is embedded inside of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange to automate email capture. One which allows emails to be tracked and classified by customer name, customer number, policy number, etc. Imagine the fields from your CRM or document management system available to you inside of Outlook or auto-filled based on the customer’s email address. Or possibly you already organize your inbox with Microsoft Outlook folders, and in which case, a solution which polls those folders for new mail items and then copies them to the appropriate records system for you.

Now customer service and account representatives are able to search for past email communications alongside other documents stored in the customer file. Similarly, advisors can easily see client communications to and from the customer service department.

Impact:

One of our Financial Service customers has over 1500 customer facing representatives for pre-sales, sales, and customer service. Saving 25 minutes per day per person translates 625 hours per day. Annually, the company saves 125,000 productivity hours. The ROI for the software was net positive within the first 3 months of implementing Email Manager.

90% of all electronic correspondence is still conducted through email. Customer service and billing are no exception, as many companies send their billings through mass email or directly from an accounts receivable clerk electronically. What happens to all those emails that are stored in your service rep’s inbox? Worse, what happens when an electronic billing bounces back due to an invalid customer email address? Read More »

For certain companies, the ability to keep track of every single emailed correspondence isn’t just a convenience – it’s vital to their success. One of our customers, Voisin Law, would not have bought Laserfiche if not for Email Manager’s ability to archive emails on send. Since each case has a unique number, all they have to do is tag an email with the proper case number and from there, Email Manager makes sure that every related email is automatically placed in the client’s file. The amount of time saved is immeasurable – which, in terms of billable hours, is something I’m quite sure their clients appreciate, too!